I swear we had read somewhere in our extensive research, an hour's worth, pre-trip, of a thing called "arduous boulder hopping" to be found in Ulrich's Couloir, which I suppose it was for a little while. But it seemed that its arduousness grew with the coming of night. And "hopping" wasn't quite describing the drop-offs we were encountering. Before we knew it, the world was as dark as the inside of a cow, and we were dropping little stones off ledges and listening to their progress to find out just how far the next "hop" would be.

Our hearing wasn't up to the task for some of those noises, and damn it if that didn't mean we had to get out the rope and our climbing gear again for some stealth rappelling. Curtis and I then began to know we were in a pickle. I remember it as being three full raps in the inky darkness. One of those didn't end on the ground, but at a hanging station on a cliff wall. It isn't as if we were totally unprepared, though. Curtis had found a cigarette lighter and so was flicking his Bic while sliding down the rope. Thus equipped, he managed to see the anchors for the next rappel and avoid slipping off the rope end to a noisy death.

All of this creeping around in the dark took time. You might think that the passage of time was a good thing then. After all, it had already gotten dark, so the next scheduled event was that it would get light. But we didn't have the time to wait for daylight. Fear was already nipping at our heels. It wasn't wild animals with sharp teeth that scared us. It wasn't the cold of night and the fact that we had no extra clothing or sleeping bags, either. And we were possibly too young and stupid to be properly scared of breaking our bones on rocks in the dark. I will admit that we were afraid of experienced climbers laughing at our dilemma, but that fear paled next to the one that kept us scurrying back and forth, feeling out hand-holds, foot-holds and escape routes in Ulrich's Couloir that night...